City of Heroes has cliches. How many? Check the master list.

Are you familiar with a trope? You should be. A trope is a totally not a cliche, and anyone that thinks so should have their fingernails removed.. Instead, tropes are, as pulled from the website, "storytelling devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations."*. It's anything in fictionalized worlds that are a common experience. The Inner Monologue, Solving a murder because the killer is left handed, the overpowered character that solves the cast's problems? These are some good ol' fashioned tropes...

... and a game with 5.5 years of comic book homage would be hard pressed not to fall into more than a couple.

What really surprised me, though, is just how many tropes we've tagged. Guess how many. Now guess higher. Higher... not high enough yet...

Want to know just how many? Click the image below and see just how many tropes and cliches we've tagged.

Be careful, though. Even our forums end up on a trope or two.

Lampshade Hanging: To address a plot point unnaturally, but for the sake of the audience. You better believe we do this

*Please note that this significantly different from cliches, which are, by definition: "anything that has become trite or commonplace through overuse."

Edit: Fixed.

I've already read that page a while ago

You know, I always assumed that it's just the kind of community we have. Quite a few people here strike me as the type to add tropes to such a site, and I'm one of them myself.

And I guarantee you that among the various player characters, EVERY trope is made manifest somewhere. Personally I lean toward these for 95% of my characters, and I have a character named Staff Chick who's waiting on Staff Melee.

CoH, TV Tropes, and Order of the Stick. It just doesn't get any better than that.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Tropes are not cliches. lrn2read the home page, nwb.

In seriousness, I am an unabashed troper. I have been for a few years, now. And, yes, I'm a bit impressed by how many tropes City of Heroes has managed to touch on over the years.

Now, if any of you happen to read this before entering the site, I warn you. The siren song is difficult to resist, and we freely admit that troping might ruin your life.

But, it's also absolutely fascinating.

Life's a trope and then you die!

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

I used to be a troper, until I left due to disagreements with how admin were running the site.

For those tropers wondering, yes, it has to do with renames, the so-called "dominance of anime", and suchlike. Disagreements with other community members I can tolerate. Disagreements with admin who go "if you don't like how it's run you're free to leave" is not as easy.

There's still a Tropers global channel in-game.

I loved that page...

Bookmarked!

I love that site TV Tropes, and I definitely saw the CoH page. It was funny seeing all the tropes they listed and go "Yeah, that IS in the game!"

As others have said, tropes are writing tools, not cliches. Some tropes my qualify as such, but most are too simple in nature to qualify as such. They're just segments that fit together to help build a story.

And I'm a long time Troper (hey DKellis. It's Miijhal. By the way, the whole 'TvTropes? More like AnimeTropes' thing seems to have died off). We actually have a heroside and villain side SG (Designate Heroes and Card Carrying Villains), although they're both pretty inactive.

@Primal: Yeah. The channel name is Tropers.

Good stuff - I enjoy reading over those from time to time.

Fixed.

*clicks link*

*5 hours later*


Curse you Tobay!

Most tropes have multiple categories of examples, and some don't even have an anime category. You'll notice the 'Anime & Manga' category first, but that's because the categories are listed in alphabetical order.

This is awesome! I've been reading the site, and now have everything I need for my next dozen MA arcs!